A number of neurological disorders including, e.g., motor neuron disorders (e.g., damage from stroke, injury, diseases such as ALS and MS), psychiatric disorders, memory disorders, and auditory disorders involve the impairment of a set of nerve cells. In many cases, the malfunction of these cells prevents or degrades communication between healthy sets of cells.
Various neural prosthetics have been developed to bypass malfunctioning cells to restore communication between the healthy cells. However, in typical cases, the bypassed impaired cells do not simply operate as signal pass-throughs, but instead provide processing of signals. In cases where a neural prosthetic does not accurately mimic the processing of the bypassed cells, the subject will exhibit degraded function in comparison to an unimpaired subject.
Thus, there exists a need to develop a neural prosthesis that bypasses or “jumps” impaired signaling cells, while providing a close proxy of the processing of the bypassed impaired signaling cells (i.e., such that the input to output transfer function of the prosthesis is well matched to that which would have been exhibited by the bypassed signaling cells in an unimpaired subject).